The human rights industry

The concept of human rights in its modern form gradually came into existence during the English, American and French Revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the concept itself did not make much of an impact on international affairs until the twentieth century, particularly during the second phase (1941-1945) of the Second World War. Officially democratic countries like Great Britain and the USA, in an anti-fascist alliance with the officially communist USSR , claimed to be fighting the war for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Victorious in 1945, that alliance was then transformed into the United Nations Organization, which brought together many leading jurists to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. Back then, the most important author of that document, Canada’s own John Humphrey, neatly summarized the main ideological thrust of what was to become the Western-dominated human rights industry with his focus on individual, as opposed to collective, rights.

Right off the bat, many non-Western countries objected to some of the fundamental rights outlined in that document. For example, many Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, refused to comply with any rights that might conflict with Islamic sharia law, such as equality between men and women. Other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, disagreed with that radical stance, at least back then. Over the past several decades, however, the Muslim community as a whole has never really resolved that dilemma, especially since the recent, world-wide revival of radical Islam.

The Western countries, led by the USA, were quite happy to promote such individual rights as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, as part of their Cold War propaganda against the official communist movement, then in the process of developing a world-wide, Eastern bloc of countries. The USSR and its allies promptly fell into the totalitarian, anti-democratic trap by pretending to agree with most of those individual rights but then cynically refusing to implement any of them in any real way. Back then, however, the not so democratic West also included South African apartheid (1948-1991), which is still an economic reality even nowadays. Not to mention the USA’s dismal record on civil rights for African-Americans, the fact that all the newer Western countries (Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) have always discriminated against native peoples generally, and so on.

Up until the implosion of the various branches of the Marxist-Leninist movement during the 1980s, the officially-communist countries fought back against the Western emphasis on individual rights by focusing instead on collective rights. Their point of view was that the political rights in the individual sphere of human existence could not truly be separated from the collective rights that tended to dominate the economic, social and cultural spheres. Before disappearing, they managed to pass on that manner of interpreting human rights to their Third World allies in the anti-colonialist movement. Most of the new nations that became independent after Western colonialism was defeated adopted that point of view and changed the UN’s initial focus on individual rights.

As a result, in 1976, the UN adopted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a document that was signed, but not ratified, by the USA. It emphasized such things as labor rights, and the rights to social security, an adequate standard of living, health, and free education, as well as the right to participate in cultural life. From then on, the official United Nations Organization point of view was that the International Bill of Human Rights included not only the 1948 declaration and the 1976 covenant, but also an additional International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, dealing with such issues as slavery and the death penalty. In other words, the overall UNO officially decided that it would neither emphasize individual (civil and political) rights over collective (economic, social and cultural) rights, nor collective rights over individual rights, but would instead try to promote both equally.

What really happened, however, was that none of the world’s countries ever fully implemented any of those rights. Although some progress has been made over the past few decades towards many of those goals, in several different countries, human rights as a whole are still light-years away from being fully recognized nowadays. As I mentioned before, this is particularly obvious in the unusually large number of Muslim countries run by fundamentalist governments nowadays. The idea that theocratic religion should have total control over every possible aspect of life means that the very concept of human rights is seen as devil worship, not only among radical Muslims but also in every other ultra-reactionary religious formation. Still, this has not prevented true believers all over the world from cynically using freedom of religion as an ideological weapon in their competing crusades for world domination.

But the most important enemy of human rights in the twenty-first century is, paradoxically, neoliberalism. In theory, the libertarian, laissez-faire onslaught against state intervention in economic, social and cultural affairs should have become a major ally for human rights, at least in its original version as a leading aspect of Western individualism. Instead, neoliberal privatization, deregulation, globalization, speculation, shareholder autocracy, tax evasion, public-sector austerity and the war on the welfare state, have all helped to establish the largest income gap between the social classes that has ever existed, all over the world.

The number of people in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than two US dollars a day, may have declined in many different countries, but the enormous increase in the wealth of a few million ultra-rich people has made the entire world an even more unequal place than it was before neoliberalism began its propaganda onslaught during the 1980s. This is particularly true in the world’s most unequal countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa and the USA. Curiously enough, the world’s leading billionaires not only support the entire neoliberal agenda, they also simultaneously finance every kind of religious atavism as well.

Naive observers and sycophants often claim that the rise of the middle class in formerly Third World countries is leading toward greater equality instead. But one billion “extremely poor” people (living on less than 700 dollars US per year), three billion “poor” people (700 to 3000 dollars per year), and two billion not really “middle class” people (3000 to 30000 dollars per year), by Western standards only leaves one billion people with anything near a decent standard of living. And given the fact that the top 500 ultra-rich people control half of the world’s global income, the least that can be said is that social equality is regressing badly at the moment.

Neoliberal sycophants also refuse to admit that the rising income gap has any effect whatsoever on human rights, not only economic, social and cultural rights, but also political and individual rights. In reality, however, there is nothing like abject poverty to convince people to focus on economic and social survival rather than enjoy the luxury of complaining about their theoretically guaranteed rights. In most parts of the world nowadays, people who complain about their rights anyway are constantly being beaten over the head, thrown in jail and/or killed, quite similar to the way the working-class in the West was treated during the first and second industrial revolutions.

If people in the Western-based human rights industry were truly interested in achieving their official goal of gaining human rights for all, they would aim most of their propaganda at promoting at least a modicum of social equality. Instead, most of the non-governmental organizations inside the human rights movement spend most of their time trying to defend minority groups whose causes have become popular with the middle-class activists who belong to those organizations. By focusing on minority rights in particular, they leave everyone the impression that discrimination against minorities is a thing unto itself, that can only be overcome by patiently teaching the general public about the moral evils of prejudice.

Unfortunately, the human rights industry’s general focus on individualism allows  billionaires and other powerful people the opportunity to blame popular prejudice for recent backsliding on human rights issues. But the various different minorities are not just suffering from the disgusting behavior of evil ordinary people, they are also suffering from the same onslaught that afflicts the moderate (silent) majorities, namely the diversion of investment resources from social progress to social regression. Even women, half the entire human population, are often treated as just another minority group. Many organizations in the human rights industry allow freedom of religion to trump women’s rights, not to mention gay rights and the rights of those who want freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion.

By accepting the ideological straitjacket of thinking about human rights as being mainly involved with the treatment of minorities, the human rights industry tends to ignore the class or income divisions that affect everyone. This reduces its capacity to understand society as a whole and therefore to let the world’s most important decision makers get away with a divide and conquer strategy, pitting majorities against minorities and one kind of minority against another kind of minority.

A particularly poignant example of this kind of thing comes from the very unequal dispensation of justice in just about every country. Someone who was truly interested in human rights as a guiding principle of social governance would normally be expected to  ask himself (or herself) why hundreds of millions of people are now languishing in prison, not always for good reasons, whereas hundreds of millions of other people having committed the same crimes, or worse, have never even been arrested. Aside from the simple-minded rejoinder that the overworked police forces cannot be expected to arrest every single perpetrator, a more penetrating analysis would undoubtedly focus on why a much larger percentage of people in high places get away with their crimes than do more ordinary criminals.

Not to mention the fact that most ordinary criminals commit their crimes under orders from the world’s most important people, and that many police forces all over the world often participate in those crimes, rather than suppressing them. Why do human rights organizations so seldom focus their attention on criminality, not just from the standpoint of minorities proportionately ending up in prison far more often than (silent) majorities, but from the standpoint of massive corruption in high places? Isn’t the fact that very few of the world’s most important people end up in jail for crimes committed under their orders a major kind of human rights abuse? If an abuse is committed for reasons of social standing, isn’t that just as important as an abuse committed because those in power are constantly taking advantage of minority populations?

Human rights are not some kind of special category of life that can be separated from everything else. All the rights that are respected, or ignored, are treated in one way or the other because of the very same social forces that make real democracy for everyone so difficult to put into practice. Nothing will ever be achieved on a permanent basis for human rights unless or until humanity figures out how to deal with today’s unprecedented levels of social inequality.

The hubris of aggressive predators

The insufferable Dominique Strauss-Kahn used to be Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (2007-2011), but has been in the news since that time mostly because of a series of trials brought on by his innumerable sexual escapades. As part of his defense against accusations of bullying and mistreatment of scores of prostitutes and girl-friends, he explained that his only crime was in fact to have a greater and more brutal sex-drive than most men.

This type of brazen eructation means that DSK is definitely one of those toxic personalities that I have been denouncing over the years. Like his nominal ancestor Genghis Khan, he belongs to a long list of sexual predators that have been nonchalantly ruining millions of other people’s lives since the beginning of recorded history. That list includes such well-known aggressors as Mao Ze-tung, Joseph Mobutu, JFK, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby and thousands of others, all of whom have in common not only their insatiable appetites for sexual domination, but also their hubristic attempts to justify their behavior as just another innocent aspect of their obviously superior personalities. Some of the world’s most powerful women are (or were) also quite capable of behaving in this manner, but most of the well-known historical examples are men.

What makes people like these so important in human society is not so much the sexual aspect of their collective rottenness as their capacity to get away with whatever kind of predatory activity that they choose to adopt. Sexual predation, after all, is just one of the ways in which the world’s most aggressive people make their domineering presence known to their endless numbers of victims. Instead of sexual appetite, the thirst for power is probably the most well-recorded motivation for sadistic violence, the leaders of all the world’s most important empires, past and present, vying for first place on the Olympic podium of cadaver making.

Every culture and every religion known to mankind can be justly proud of its own leading contributors. In recent times as well as in ancient times, the world’s most powerful people have done their best to kill as many enemies as possible, collateral damage to millions of innocent bystanders greatly enhancing their competing claims to fame. Some of the more modern aggressors have only succeeded in amassing greater quantities of corpses for themselves than more ancient participants because of technological progress and the much larger human populations that have become more recently available for slaughter.

But sex and power are not the only recorded justifications for rotten behavior among our leading citizens. Historically, the search for wealth has always been invoked as just as important as any of the other competing sources of motivation. During the past several centuries, every major financial crisis can be traced back to the insatiable appetites of the world’s greediest investors. Corrupt politicians in every part of the world have all taken considerable pride in making sure that their favorite millionaires and billionaires could always pass on most of the negative side effects of their colossal greed to the unsuspecting, small-time stakeholders that they were only nominally supposed to be representing.

Since the beginning of the current century, this particular motivation for aggressive predation has taken on a new wrinkle. Nowadays, the world’s leading politicians are all engaged in a frenzied rush to become more competitive than those of any other jurisdiction, by providing the maximum number of additional tax breaks and subsidies to the world’s largest holders of capital, the same ones responsible for the sub-prime crises, the enormous bribes doled out to win important contracts, the illegal tax dodges and the undercover funding for terrorist groups. To be sure, the corrupt politicians always pretend that they only want to encourage big-time owners of capital to stop hoarding and invest their money instead, thus providing jobs for millions of unemployed people. Even if, in extreme cases, those jobs are just to act as cannon fodder in foreign wars.

However, the crisis of confidence among all the world’s most important vulture capitalists since 2008 has been so overwhelming that most of them are simply holding onto their ill-gotten gains and pocketing all the legal tax breaks, alongside the illegal ones. All over the world, every single austerity program aimed at controlling public expenditure has thereby been turned into a massive political gambit that seems to be deliberately aimed at further increasing the already colossal income gap between the social classes.

Instead of alleviating some of the most negative effects of casino capitalism on ordinary people, like some of them were supposed to have done in the past, elected and non-elected politicians nowadays are doing exactly the opposite. Their thoroughly misleading programs only serve to increase the enormous quantities of unused capital that none of the world’s leading vultures dare to invest in anything useful, less they too be ripped off by their even more bloodthirsty, fellow vultures. Instead of investing in environmentally sustainable economic development, today’s financial predators are just moving their money around from one ultra-speculative pile of cash to another, avoiding doing anything that might give anyone else an opportunity to deprive them of their hard-earned booty.

Unfortunately, not a great deal can be done to stop any of these different kinds of world-class predators (often the same people). If it were only the world’s VIPs acting like monsters something could presumably be done about overcoming this disease. But everyone who has ever been witness to playground or schoolyard bullying knows for a fact that each victimized child is pretty much on his or her own, long before the reluctant authorities bother themselves sufficiently to intervene. This pattern of official identification with the aggressor, that every human being is forced to witness over and over again, has continued throughout recorded time to be a major component of human social behavior.

What is different about the current, ultra-individualist period of history, however, is that a large number of extraordinarily dangerous excuses for acting like a spoiled brat or an egotistical maniac are being increasingly tolerated, even more than they were in previous periods. There are dozens of different examples to choose from nowadays.

Probably the most important example is environmental damage, in which the criminal activities of the world’s biggest polluters, most of them in the extractive industries, are being strongly supported by large numbers of small-time collaborators. Modern transportation is the most obvious arena in which millions of gas-guzzling, individualistic SUV owners merrily condone the doctored science of climate-change deniers, funded by the suppliers of the world’s most important fossil fuels. Not having to use public transit, and therefore not having to rub elbows with lesser forms of human life, provides the red-blooded, freedom-loving suburbanites with the kind of existential elbow-room that only methane and carbon dioxide emissions can safely provide.

Another fascinating example of popular support for billionaire nihilism is the rising tide of ultra-conservative religious fundamentalism. Although this seems at the outset to be an entirely different kind of phenomenon than those already mentioned, it turns out that most religious fundamentalists in this world also support laissez-faire libertarianism. Succeeding in life without seemingly getting any support from government social programs is very popular with Christian fundamentalists all over the Western world, most of whom purport to believe that “God helps those who help themselves”. Conservative parties in the West, like the Republicans in the USA, have been bringing together radical religion, radical individualism and militarized forms of patriotic propaganda for decades.

Curiously enough, however, libertarian sentiments in social policy are also very popular in places where Christianity as such is no longer being tolerated. The entire Muslim world, not only in Muslim majority countries of either the Sunni or the Shiite versions, but also among Muslim minorities inside Western countries, is currently embroiled in several alarming attempts at turning the moderate masses sharply toward the extreme right. Billionaire-funded organizations on the Sunni side include the very extreme Islamic State in western Asia, and its African branches in Libya and Nigeria, the slightly less extreme Muslim Brotherhood, and dozens of similar organizations elsewhere. While on the much smaller Shiite side, the Iranian theocracy is trying its best to capitalize on support from the Iraqi government, the Lebanese Hezbollah and similar movements in places like Yemen and Bahrein.

At the same time, inside the Muslim diaspora throughout the Western world, the same ultra-reactionary movements are trying to provoke as many radicalized immigrants and converts as possible to attack non-Muslim Western targets. Their goal seems to be not only paying back Western empires for recent military adventures in Muslim countries, but also to provoke Islamophobic reactions among ultra-right wing Christians and Jews.

The overall idea seems to be to turn Samuel Huntington’s twentieth-century fantasy about a world-wide clash of civilizations into a functioning scenario. India has recently re-elected a Hindu nationalist movement as well, similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Christian fundamentalists in also supporting laissez-faire libertarianism. Comparable movements are also active among various extreme Buddhist factions, notably in Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and Japan. Each major world religion seems to possess a large and growing neofascist component, billionaire-funded in every case and infecting every large-sized group of emigrants to other parts of the world.

What all these different groups of people have in common is their complete lack of a social conscience. Belonging to the human race does not seem to have any effect at all on today’s ultra-libertarians, who want their individual rights to be guaranteed, without accepting any responsibility whatsoever for the effects of their egoism on the society around them. This is true whether they are the world’s most important people (sexual predators, empire builders, vulture capitalists), or just very ordinary people (suburbanites and radicalized religious folk) who feel that since we are all living in the most individualistic period of human history, they too should be democratically permitted to get away with whatever it is that they feel like doing.

In many countries, politically-correct sycophants are using national and international charters of human rights as a convenient method of providing cover for radicalized extremists. Freedom of religion, for example, is being extensively misinterpreted to include neofascist behavior, particularly among Muslim reactionaries, from the relatively innocuous wearing of anti-feminist, cover-up, clothing all the way up to the killing of Western cartoonists. Those found guilty of drawing caricatures of Mohamed are said to have brought their deaths on themselves by provoking their murderers, much in the same way that women all over the world are said to have brought rape on themselves by wearing provocative clothing.

Religious-minded people in particular enjoy referring to charters of rights for the obvious reason that none of them seem to have included freedom from religion in their lists of rights. Unbelievers are probably the largest group of people in today’s world who do not enjoy any kind of human rights protection at all. Curiously enough, however, the same apologizers also try to provide political cover for religious and philosophical sects that do not believe in supporting modern medical science, even to the extent of refusing vaccination for their children. In other words, over-accommodating religious extremism could easily plunge humanity back into the kind of world we used to live in before penicillin was discovered.  

Now more than ever, human societies are afflicted with all different kinds of egotistical aggression. Libertarians with a great deal of money or power are doing their best to convince as many ordinary people as possible to rally round whichever populist flag they happen to be flying. The world’s VIP predators end up being considerably more dangerous than the less powerful ones, not just for their own direct crimes but also for their radicalizing effect on the world’s remaining moderate majorities. As a result, even though the number of cadavers has declined slightly since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, if current trends continue we should be getting back to higher numbers again very soon. It should not take too long before the combined efforts of the neoliberal mobsters, the billionaire-funded religious barbarians and the world’s other leading predators manage to catch up with their top-scoring predecessors from the Cold War period.

L’amalgame à rebours

Depuis les attentants terroristes contre les caricaturistes de Charlie-Hebdo et les autres victimes innocentes, les fantassins de la rectitude politique ne cessent de nous mettre en garde contre la tentation de l’amalgame. Pour ces bien-pensants, le mot amalgame dans ce contexte veut dire la réaction primaire de la part de certains non-musulmans, voulant faire de chaque musulman dans ce monde un fanatique islamique et un terroriste potentiel. Nos partisans de la rectitude dénoncent aussi l’islamophobie, c’est-à-dire la peur déraisonnable de tout ce qui concerne l’islam, dans ses diverses versions modérées aussi bien que dans ses nombreuses versions radicales. Toutefois, ils vont trop loin dans cette direction, accusant de racisme non seulement les islamophobes primaires mais aussi tous ceux qui refusent d’adopter une attitude accommodante envers les intégristes.

Tous ces bien-pensants, au Québec et ailleurs, ont la fâcheuse tendance à toujours vouloir blâmer l’Occident pour tout, même pour tout ce qui relève plutôt des islamistes eux-mêmes. En d’autres mots, ils font ce qu’on pourrait appeler un amalgame à rebours, en essayant de culpabiliser l’ensemble des Occidentaux pour avoir créé les conditions nécessaires à la montée de l’islamisme et de ses dérives terroristes. Or, ça prend un peu plus qu’un terreau fertile pour expliquer vraiment pourquoi les musulmans les plus radicaux ont décidé de passer à l’acte et d’assassiner de plus en plus de victimes civiles, dans des pays occidentaux aussi bien que dans des pays à majorité musulmane.

Bien sûr, il faut quand même reconnaître que l’Occident n’est pas du tout sans faute dans ce dossier. Les dirigeants des empires occidentaux ont souvent envoyé beaucoup de leurs soldats dans des pays musulmans, pendant plusieurs siècles. Leurs interventions les plus récentes, même celles en théorie dirigées contre des dictatures militaires ou contre des mouvements islamistes les plus meurtriers, ont souvent dérapé. Ces interventions ont tué beaucoup de non-combattants et laissé ces pays avec davantage de problèmes que ceux que ces mêmes pays en possédaient auparavant. De plus, le soutien inconditionnel de l’Occident envers Israël, pas du tout conforme à une prétendue neutralité entre l’état sioniste et le peuple palestinien, a laissé une blessure permanente entre l’Occident et l’ensemble des pays musulmans.

À l’intérieur des pays occidentaux aussi, les dirigeants n’ont pas souvent travaillé très fort, parfois pas du tout, pour essayer de bien intégrer les immigrants musulmans. Le résultat a souvent été de créer des ghettos périurbains, dégoûtants, insalubres et sans espoir, pour beaucoup de ces immigrants. Ainsi, il n’y a pas de doute, les dirigeants occidentaux ont effectivement créé un terreau fertile pour l’émergence de dérives violentes, surtout celles d’origine islamiste.

Toutefois, il est absurde, encore davantage qu’autrefois, de tout mettre sur le dos des puissances occidentales. Même si d’un point de vue militaire, les pays occidentaux semblent encore posséder un certain avantage, ce n’est plus le cas du point de vue économique. De nos jours, avec la montée économique de plusieurs pays de l’ancien tiers-monde, il y a autant de millionaires et de milliardaires dans le monde non-occidental qu’il y en a dans le monde occidental. En Asie, en Afrique et en Amérique latine, en dépit des prétentions de leurs politiciens quant à leur indépendance décisionnelle vis-à-vis des grands investisseurs, ces gens riches contrôlent quasiment tout ce qui se passe dans leurs pays, autant sinon plus qu’en Occident. Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, la grande majorité de ces richissismes ont autant tendance qu’en Occident à faire absolument tout pour garder leurs privilèges sociaux, avec tous les moyens à leur disposition. La plupart des dirigeants de ces pays se concentrent aussi fortement qu’en Occident sur leurs “vraies affaires”, ignorant les besoins de leurs populations pour s’occuper exclusivement de leur propre accumulation du capital.

Pour réaliser cet objectif, comme partout ailleurs, ces dirigeants doivent manipuler l’opinion publique, pour convaincre les gens ordinaires à laisser tomber leurs propres revendications sociales. Hier comme aujourd’hui, le moyen de contrôle idéologique de masse le plus efficace, est encore la religion, toujours utilisée par les dirigeants en tant qu’opium du peuple. Ainsi, les terroristes islamistes ne sont devenus que les petits soldats de ces mêmes milliardaires ultra-puissants qui, eux, ne semblent pas aussi croyants que leurs subalternes. C’est quand même l’argent des ultra-riches des pays musulmans qui financent tous les mouvements islamistes les plus meurtriers. Autrefois, quand des idéologies collectivistes d’origine occidentale, telles que le nationalisme et le communisme, possédaient un peu d’influence dans ces mêmes pays, les puissances occidentales ont souvent aidé les islamistes à éliminer cette influence. De nos jours, suite à l’affaiblissement radical de ces idéologies séculières dans ces régions, l’influence que les puissances occidentales possédaient sur ces mouvements religieux, ultra-réactionnaires, a rapidement disparu.

Bien sûr, cet islamisme n’a pas nécessairement grand-chose à voir avec l’islam historique, en tant que tel. Comme c’est le cas de tous les fondamentalistes des autres grandes religions, les islamistes préfèrent ne choisir que les caractéristiques historiques de leur religion qui font leur affaire, laissant tomber d’autres caractéristiques moins intéressantes à leurs yeux. C’est ce qui explique, par exemple, leur opposition totale à toute représentation illustrée du prophète Mohamed, une admonition qui semble avoir été ignorée dans la plupart du monde musulman avant la montée en puissance de l’empire ottoman, au XVIe siècle. La capacité démontrée des terroristes islamistes à convaincre les opportunistes occidentaux à laisser tomber leurs propres principes laïcs, est ainsi devenue une sorte d’idôlatrie à rebours, les militants préférant adorer leur nouvelle puissance militaire davantage que leur Dieu théorique.

Pour toutes ces raisons, nos bien-pensants en Occident font fausse route en essayant de nous culpabiliser quant à l’origine exclusivement occidentale du terrorisme islamiste. Les dévots musulmans ne sont pas des enfants et ils n’ont pas besoin des mères-patries occidentales pour les aider à adopter, ou à rejeter, une version extrêmement violente de leur religion. Ils ont la capacité humaine, comme tout le monde, à choisir entre les idées progressistes et les idées réactionnaires. Ils ont choisi, en toute connaissance de cause, à ignorer l’interdiction officielle de leur religion contre le meurtre, et de tuer des innocents, aussi souvent, sinon plus, que les soldats des armées occidentales.

Liberal and neoliberal extremism

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, the pages of most of the world’s media are once again full of denunciations of religious extremism. The assassinations of 17 people, 12 of them in the headquarters of France’s leading satirical magazine, certainly seem to be part of Islamic fascism’s world-wide attempt to forever silence any non-Muslim critics of that religion. Radical Islamists are trying to prevent anyone at all from depicting the prophet Mohamed in any way, or for whatever reason, as part of their desire to impose their beliefs on everyone else and ultimately take over the world.

As followers of one of the world’s most extreme right-wing ideologies, the Islamists are continuing their murderous campaign to force everyone into adopting some form of behavior that will further their cause. Their goal is to terrorize millions of people into slavish acceptance of every one of their dictates, in this case by removing their prophet from any form of visual corruption by dirty infidels. Hypocritically, they are also continuing to encourage as many Muslim women as possible to to wear cover-up clothing in public, such as the hijab, as a kind of advertising symbol for their religion. Anyone who objects to either of those propaganda stunts is denounced as a racist, even though Islam, as a theoretically universal religion, is hardly confined to any one “race”.

The murders themselves were also deliberately committed to provoke even more extreme right-wing reactions by rival forms of fascism, explicitly to encourage the rise of anti-Muslim ultra-conservative movements among non-Muslim populations. Anyone kowtowing to their incessant demands, or responding to their provocations in a reactionary way, will only help them achieve their goal of world domination, either by turning millions of their opponents into sniveling cowards, or by driving the moderate Muslim majority into their arms for protection against the other kinds of extremists.

Unfortunately, current denunciations of the Islamic ideology by most of the world’s leading politicians and professional publicists are often insincere and hypocritical, coming from people with radical agendas of their own. The easiest reactions to unmask are those coming from fundamentalist factions based in every one of Islam’s rival religions--Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, etc., etc. Those people’s criticisms of Islamic terrorism are highly suspect, coming as they do from ultra-orthodox movements sharing multiple characteristics with ultra-conservative Muslims, such as literal interpretations of religious texts, long-standing accommodations with “prehistoric” tribal customs, and often successful attempts at forcing millions of non-believers to accept their own religious dictates.

Other ideological reactions to the Islamist onslaught are somewhat more subtle. A few surviving, left-wing ideologues, for example, still cling to the hoary Third World apology for extremism, according to which it is perfectly acceptable to denounce Western imperialism’s Judaeo-Christian prejudices, but not the religious pretensions of oppressed peoples originally based in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Back in 1979, this curious idea helped convince dozens of left-wing organizations, and countries, to support the Islamic counter-revolution in Iran against the American-financed Shah. Today, those same self-deprecating ideologues still think that sectarian and/or communitarian customs coming from “Oriental” systems of belief, even when imposed by violent methods, even by people living for several generations in the West, are much more acceptable than anything coming from strictly Western traditions.

This kind of thinking could have had some kind of sympathetic origin in the past, when the liberal empires from the West completely dominated most of the other regions in the world.  Even today, most of the Third World countries are still a lot poorer and relatively under-developed when compared with most of the countries in the West. But the right-wing, theocratic totalitarianism and obscurantism that still afflicts many non-Western countries is not fundamentally of Western origin, even though many Western empires have allied themselves with those same reactionaries in the past. It is hopelessly naive to pretend that the disgustingly rich, ultra-conservative billionaires, in power nowadays all over Asia, Africa and Latin America, are somehow better than the Western elites, no matter what their own official ideological projections may turn out to be. Even the former statistical concentration of excessively wealthy individuals in the Western countries is not at all obvious nowadays.

A more important form of anti-Islamist hypocrisy, however, is coming directly from the liberal empires themselves, France, Great Britain and the USA. During the entire twentieth century, those empires regularly used the promotion of different varieties of Islamic ultra-orthodoxy, such as Wahhabism or the Muslim Brotherhood, to help them defeat nationalist and communist movements throughout the Muslim world. During the Cold War, the USA was particularly active, as recently as during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989), in promoting the careers of many of the future soldiers and leaders of Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic organizations. As presidential candidate Barry Goldwater put it back in 1964, in the not entirely unrelated circumstances of the Vietnam War, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. For those liberal empires to now denounce Islamic State or the terrorist assassins at Charlie Hebdo is a bigger joke than anything that the cartoonists themselves ever dreamed up. It is even funnier than the Islamic fascists themselves recently claiming to be the Western empires greatest enemy.

Liberal politicians and propagandists, allied with various Christian churches, have also carried out extensive campaigns in many parts of the Western world, such as Canada and Quebec, to accommodate the extremist pretensions of several different “Oriental” religions. Their main argument in so doing has been their conceit that bending over backwards in favor of religious extremism is required by their belief in fundamental human rights, such as freedom of religion. They have tried to use their upholding the excessive demands made by non-Christian sects as a wedge to help undermine secular  separation of church and state, thereby making it easier for those religious liberals to reimpose a Christian agenda on Western governments as well. Freedom of religion, yes sir, but freedom from religion, no way. This is probably the main reason why their media allies still refuse to publish any drawings of Mohamed, even after the Islamist massacre.

Even more hypocritical is the fact that the publicists of classical liberalism have always felt that the kind of individual human rights they supported were much more important than collective rights favoring economic and social development for everyone in society. Nineteenth-century liberal ideology, now revived under the title of neoliberalism, upheld the social-Darwinist pretension according to which individual investors who have become ultra-rich deserve to keep all their wealth, and do not have to share any of it with the millions of other individuals who, according to them, failed to invest their own rather limited funds as successfully as they did.

This may seem at the outset to be an entirely different subject of debate than religious fanaticism, having nothing at all to do with the Charlie Hebdo murders. However, it is just another example of ideological blindness leading to massive shortcomings in human society, that in fact helps to provide large-scale spawning grounds, all over the world, for violent attacks on the establishment. Massive rejection of the anal retention of wealth on the part of the world’s most powerful elites is coming not only from Third World countries, where the majority of the population remain ultra-poor, but also from groups of disenchanted immigrants now living in the West. Not to mention the similarly radical rejection of those same ultra-rich elites coming from millions of recently impoverished, working-class populations in the previously industrialized countries, who have never recovered from deindustrialization and the ensuing financial crisis of 2008. Encouraging right-wing anti-immigrant groups to blame right-wing immigrant groups for their problems, and vice versa, is a good way of getting the rich social-Darwinists off the hook for their own ideological arrogance.

It is true that for a few decades following the Great Depression, many of the more liberal parties in the Western countries parted company with their more conservative brethren, at least to a limited extent, in order to head off the threat posed by the rise of the labor movement and international communism. During the “thirty glorious years” of 1945-1975, that decision contributed to a gradual decrease, in many parts of the world, in the overall income gap between the rich and the poor. But by 1979-1980, with the advent of anti-inflationary monetarism and the neoliberal, electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the anti-social prejudices of classical liberalism came back into vogue. Since then, most liberal and conservative political parties in the West, including most of the former communist and social-democratic parties, have joined forces to support neoliberalism and thus to re-introduce, and to continually reinforce, an enormous, ever-growing, income gap between the social classes.

Nowadays, almost all the mainstream parties in the world, East and West, North and South, have given up on the war on poverty as well as on protecting the middle class from the economic disasters introduced by neoliberalism. One by one, they have all become well-paid instruments of the world’s leading financial investors, in the rich people’s concerted drive to reinstall the kind of million-to-one income division that already existed back in the Gilded Age, during the thirty years leading up to the First World War. Unfortunately, that was the very same extreme class division that also led to the rise of the anarchist, communist (State-capitalist) and fascist movements that dominated world politics for most of the twentieth century. Throughout the Third World, as well as inside urban ghettos in major Western cities, the debilitating social conditions now being resuscitated from the Gilded Age are recreating the depressed environment necessary to encourage extremism once again, both from immigrant and from “native” European populations. Not to mention the extreme poverty of most of the genuinely native peoples in North America and Australasia.

The austerity programs currently in vogue in most parts of the Western world are a concerted attempt on the part of the laissez-faire movement to make sure that all the tremendous wealth accumulated since the advent of neoliberalism in 1979 will remain exclusively in the hands of the rich and the ultra-rich. Political and media apologists for cut-backs in government spending argue that austerity is not really the issue, since the overall budgets of most governments, not just in the West, are still expanding. Most of that new spending, however, is not going to the poor, nor to the middle class, but to people in the upper classes. Millions of new millionaires are being created all the time, through massive financial speculation, enormous managerial bonuses, and huge profits for such worthy groups as military-hardware companies and drug dealers. Political corruption and tax evasion, both legal and illegal, are also at an all-time high. Austerity is being applied almost exclusively to the lower classes, notwithstanding a few window-dressing programs aimed at cutting industrial subsidies, or fining fraudulent investment bankers sums of money that seem huge to middle-class people but not at all to the ultra-rich.

Nevertheless, none of this financial violence against social and economic rights exonerates, or justifies, the murderous physical violence of the terrorists. It is true that the reintroduction of social Darwinism creates the ideal conditions, all over the world, for extreme right-wing assassins and extreme right-wing xenophobes to become more and more popular, by feeding off of each other. But in reality the main way in which both religious liberalism and neoliberalism are similar to both the terrorists and the xenophobes is in their extreme ideological arrogance.

The truly fundamental origin of all these seemingly opposite ideological stances is the tendency that they all share to try and dominate the world. Each one of those theoretically contradictory platforms is a sadistic attempt at convincing the world’s different groups of ordinary masochists to follow them down the primrose path of ideological collaboration. Every one of those conflicting ideologies wants to win, by eliminating all their enemies and taking over the whole world. Ordinary people, who are neither rich nor extremist, are just supposed to sit back and watch the theoretically competing groups of sadists fight it out among each other for world domination. Or for the domination of whatever is left of the world after they are all finished.

The universe is monstrous

I read recently in the newspapers that according to Stephen Hawking, the Higg’s boson, that is responsible for the existence of all matter, is an unstable particle. Apparently, it could quite easily break down and cease to function altogether, at some point, in a rapidly expanding universe like this one. If that happens, human beings, everything around us and everything that human beings know about, would just disappear, like that, without warning. This seems to me to be without a doubt the ultimate natural disaster scenario: goodbye, game over, problem solved.

So far as I can tell, this is just the latest in a long series of possible, end of the world disasters that the world’s leading scientists have been communicating to the rest of us over the past few years. Some of them are at the level of the entire universe, but most of them are concerned with smaller entities such as our own solar system, our own biosphere, or our own species. The one that seems to have been around the longest is the idea that our solar system is full of assorted space junk, such as asteroids, and that any one of several thousand pieces of rock, much larger than the ones that burn up in the atmosphere most of the time, some of them known and others unknown, could come crashing into the Earth at some point. Any reasonably large piece, such as the one that presumably wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, could easily eliminate all the larger animals on this planet, including all humans.

Another well-known scenario involves the Sun, which is inevitably going to explode several million years from now. In the meantime, a much larger sun storm, or giant flare, than the ones so far observed, could presumably happen at any time. A very large incident could wipe out our biosphere, but a more medium sized event could eliminate modern communications systems, plunging us humans back into a pre-industrial kind of world, not at all conducive to supporting the lives of seven billion people, and counting.

On the Earth itself, one of the most frequently mentioned disaster scenarios is the eruption of a super volcano, like the one lying underneath Yellowstone Park. That particular volcano apparently explodes every 300 000 years or so, and is now long overdue. The enormous pollution caused by that giant explosion would presumably bring about another kind of biosphere disaster, possibly by setting off a new ice age, or some other, equally unpleasant, event.

There are also quite a few more such scenarios of natural origin, even before the conversation turns to disasters of human origin. What makes all such natural events so monstrous is not that the whole universe, or the local solar system, or just this particular planet, somehow feel like doing something bad to human beings. The natural world has no feelings, nor does it think. Anthropomorphic theories have never impressed the world’s scientists, who are at least theoretically immune to any kind of religious nonsense, or belief in magic.

It is only the existence of sentient beings, all the ones known to us currently living right here on Earth, that make any of these scenarios potentially monstrous. This is the case not only for most other animals, who are definitely sentient, but particularly for humans, who are presumably the only animals capable of envisioning the universe beyond any particular natural habitat. Only in a monstrous universe, or at least a section of it, could thinking animals like ourselves possibly be threatened by such incredibly disgusting disasters. The natural universe is monstrous precisely because sentient, thinking animals like us could all be wiped out at any time, with no regard whatsoever for our feelings or our thoughts. Not just one person at a time, which is everyone’s future, but all humans, or at least quite a few of them, at once.

Why have people gradually evolved to the point that they are capable of realizing the situation they are in, when that situation could be, and some day probably will be, so incredibly horrible? This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many different civilizations invented all those comforting, infantile, anthropomorphic, religious fantasies in the first place. Those human beings who think a bit more deeply, and rationally, than their religious cousins do, still have to put up with the fact that there is no way out of this fundamental, ontological dilemma. Rational humans are forced to realize that everyone lives in a truly monstrous universe, even though many people are not capable of dealing with such a thought.

But the horror of that grown-up acceptance of reality is certainly compounded by the equally mortifying realization that a large percentage of the human population does not utilize its theoretical capacity for free will. Inventing religious traditions is just one of the ways in which millions of people behave like the objects in space mentioned earlier, pushed into current trajectories by enormous forces, and unable to change direction without some other equally enormous counter-force, intervening from outside their own limited attention spans. Their incredibly strong devotion to tradition and to ultra-conservative ways of thinking, indicates that they are really much too terrified of reality to accept the capacity of exercising free will in any genuine sense.

Much of the time, this overpowering inertia is even disguised as its opposite. People will say that they are in fact exercising their free will when they refuse to conform to any evolutionary restrictions on their traditional activities. Millions of people all over the world continue to practice ancient religious habits that are in total contradiction with current living conditions, the sacred cows of the Hindu culture having become a metaphor for all  those completely outdated traditions. In search of some particular version of parochial identity, millions of religious or ideological fundamentalists in every country or denomination insist on trying to recreate ideas that reflect the social conditions prevailing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago, thereby preventing them from adapting to the kind of globalized world that exists nowadays.

Some people try to argue that human beings are capable of controlling their passions sufficiently to avoid causing at least man-made disasters by pointing out that weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, did not lead to a catastrophic third world war during the Cold War (1945-1991). Leaders back then were able to use their free will to prevent their imperialist passions from overpowering their sanity and leading into what was then dubbed “spasm or insensate warfare”. But the fact that those people back then were capable of pulling back from the brink on several different occasions by no means guarantees that today’s leaders would be just as capable. The continued existence of huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons nowadays, not to mention (in spite of official denials) chemical and bacteriological stockpiles, and the proliferation of such weapons to a much larger group of political entities than before, make that kind of global disaster a very real possibility still. Even a limited exchange between relatively minor nuclear powers would probably not remain limited for very long.

But such completely inappropriate geopolitical passions, given the very existence of weapons of mass destruction, are not the only kind of antediluvian behavior that could wipe out many millions of human beings through more or less man-made causes. Another major contender is the world-wide epidemic, which at first glance seems to be a natural phenomenon, before numerous, contributing, human causes are factored in. In the past, some of the world’s worst epidemics apparently killed more people than such disasters normally do for other than natural reasons.

Even the toll from the Black Death of the fourteenth century seems to have been much greater than usual because many of the affected regions suffered major famines just prior to the arrival of the epidemic. Apparently, those famines were themselves caused by crop failures brought about by the cultivation of vast, marginal forested areas not suitable for agriculture. Most European historians also believe that it was Genoese plunderers arriving back home from what is now the Ukraine who brought the plague with them, after being bombarded by catapulted corpses from plague victims deliberately thrown at them by Muslim defenders of besieged cities. Other historians have also postulated a causal connection between the First World War and the unusually high number of deaths in the 1919 Spanish flu.

In a somewhat more obvious way, it seems that the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa was originally caused by a local tradition of touching the corpses of dead relatives before they were buried. The number of people who have so far died in that region from that particular epidemic is much smaller than from the ones previously mentioned, but the death toll from Ebola has also been exacerbated by several other regional prejudices. Not to mention popular skepticism about the real motives of national and international authorities in trying to control the spread of the disease. This resembles the commonly held but utterly ridiculous assumption a few years ago, even by several heads of state, that the AIDS epidemic was originally caused by the CIA to control the number of Black people in the world, or, alternatively, that it was somehow God’s punishment for homosexual relations.

In India, 700 million people, half the national population, apparently still defecate outdoors all the time, partly because that country is way behind many other countries in providing modern toilets but also because some of those people find that practice to be more natural and more satisfying even after they get their toilets. They either do not know, or they do not care, that outdoor defecation causes many of the most murderous diseases and epidemics that plague their land, as well as infecting their neighbors. But India is only the biggest example of that horrible practice, with dozens of other countries also participating, not only in outdoor defecation but also in hundreds of other completely inappropriate kinds of behavior.

Throughout history, the most important source of violent and premature deaths, not to mention extensive physical and psychological damage that did not immediately kill all its victims, has been sexual assault. Billions of women and girls, as well as millions of men and boys, have been variously mistreated, often raped and murdered, by egotistical monsters, mostly but not exclusively male ones, using sexual desire as camouflage for domination. Although this form of primitive behavior cannot properly be classified as an epidemic, it certainly is endemic in virtually every human society. Nowadays, the methods used by the perpetrators are the same as those that existed long ago: honor killings, forced marriage, excision, the death penalty for adultery, seclusion, premature sexualization, virginity testing, the list is endless.

In each and every case, the monsters and their lawyers have always argued their inalienable right to dominate what they call inferior beings in the most horrific ways possible, domination of those deemed weaker than them being interpreted as a natural outcome of evolution. Sexual assault is at the very origin of the survival of the fittest gambit that is also constantly being used to somehow justify racism and the domination of financially superior social classes. For these monsters, freedom is just a synonym for the slogan that might makes right. Even more now than in days gone by, racism and social inequality are also responsible for millions more premature deaths, all over the world.

Incredibly, the death toll from those particular sources is sometimes compounded by the fact that even oppressed people and classes often try to pass off mistreatment of dominated individuals within their own communities as part of their fight against race and class oppression from outside their borders. For example, some communities go so far as to refuse modern medical treatment for their afflicted children on the grounds that traditional remedies, though useless, are more politically correct. In many such cases, local authorities often uphold such decisions on the completely bogus grounds of reverse racism.

In the USA, as well as in many other countries, millions more people somehow manage to convince themselves that they are fighting for communal freedom when they continue to buy enormous gas guzzlers, in the form of SUVs or trucks, just as they used to do back in the twentieth century. They democratically refuse to listen to any of the constantly repeated ecological arguments about increasing consumption of fossil fuels leading inevitably to unprecedented levels of pollution and harmful climate change. They readily dismiss all scientific projections about how such changes in climate could  cause catastrophic numbers of deaths in the very near future, especially if those changes affect the food supply in many different regions. These people describe doing what they used to do before, even relatively recently, as an exercise in popular freedom, while simultaneously misinterpreting social pressure to control pollution as a form of totalitarianism.

Some of these same people occasionally try to rationalize their attitude by proclaiming that since rich and powerful people can always get away with anti-social behavior, then people in the middle-class should also be allowed to do whatever they want. Their egoism mirrors that of the leaders of the newly industrialized countries, like China, who rationalize their major contributions to world pollution by pointing out that the Western countries and Japan started along the same path a century or two before they were allowed to join in. Middle-class people trying to imitate the rich are also similar to oppressed people in many different parts of the world, like the poor white trash in the southern USA, who find it impossible to abandon racism because they think that mistreating Black people is the only way they can compensate for their own humiliation by rich Southerners, and rich Northerners as well.

Millions of middle-class polluters have also been brainwashed by billionaire propaganda into believing that excessive government is the primary cause for every major problem nowadays, including the series of major recessions that were in fact caused by the colossal greediness of huge private investors. Even after government presumably saved the world economy from impending disaster, with massive handouts to major investors through such programs as quantitative easing, the brainwashed ones refuse to acknowledge reality and cling to free enterprise fantasies instead. They refuse to recognize that private capitalism has always relied on government intervention in order to survive. The same laissez-faire fantasy also afflicts dozens of other countries and millions of other people, including such rather unlikely adherents as the newest prime minister of India.

However, he is only the most recent example of a leading politician combining fundamentalist religious views with libertarian economic policies. The USA practically invented that curious combination of seemingly contradictory belief systems, existing simultaneously within the same overheated brains. That chaotic combination of ingredients has also been copied by several other kinds of religious fundamentalists, particularly by the world’s leading Muslim extremists.

In the USA also, the same people from the religious right who believe in neoliberalism also proclaim that the only way to stop a bad guy carrying a gun is by using a good guy carrying a gun. Their incapacity to think in a dynamic way means that they refuse to realize that as soon as many of those good guys start carrying guns for any length of time, they often start to become bad guys themselves. In reality, as soon as any small minority of people begin to get used to having an enormous advantage over anyone else, such as by getting a license to kill, or by making a million times more money than most other people do, the corruption process starts to take over. It does not take very long for most people possessing some kind of major advantage over their fellow humans to let that power go to their heads and turn into the kind of person that many of them may have originally intended to oppose.

But this process of creeping corruption not only affects potentially murderous people with guns, such as police, criminals and military forces. Most of the world’s reformists, as well as most of the revolutionaries in history, who succeeded in gaining the power to put their political agendas into practice, have ended up betraying the cause later on. Those people gradually started doing exactly the opposite of what they were initially supposed to be doing, thereby contributing to the world’s problems rather than helping to solve them. The Communist Party of China is perhaps the most extreme example of such corruption, among hundreds of thousands of other such betrayals.

What fundamentally differentiates knee-jerk reactions, to any of these potentially catastrophic problems, from people who genuinely use their capacity for free will in a dynamic way, is the ability to understand empathy. Reductionists always interpret free will as the freedom to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences to other groups of people, and ultimately to themselves. They forget that they cannot really be free unless everyone on this planet is free, which is even more evident nowadays than it ever was in the past. True believers in any particular religion, or any particular ideology, cannot justify imposing their faith on everyone else as easily in today’s world as they used to do in the past when most such prejudices were confined to one particular region. In a super globalized world, with so many opposing belief systems vying for attention, trying to impose an extreme version of any one faith on everyone else is just another invitation to disaster.

Similarly, defecating outdoors, or touching corpses, are simply different ways of potentially visiting massive death tolls on one’s neighbors as well as on oneself. Continuing to promote the increased use of fossil fuels is another excellent example of a knee-jerk interpretation of free will, as is supporting libertarian fantasies about non-existent free enterprise, or by opposing gun control. In reality, free will means adapting to current political, economic, social and cultural conditions by abandoning ideological postures that may have seemed appropriate dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years ago but have no justification whatsoever in today’s world. To paraphrase Lord Acton, liberty means having the right to act responsibly for oneself, and for others, without having to kowtow to outdated traditions. Nor, in fact, to the reactionary manipulation of popular opinion by billionaire political action committees, or billionaire governments in ultra-conservative, theocratic nations.

Over the centuries, human beings have become intelligent enough to figure out, at least partially, how the monstrous, natural universe that we are all forced to live in really seems to work. But it remains to be seen if we can become intelligent enough to avoid any of the equally monstrous workings of our own, human nature.

History is Imperfect

I have either been making history (a few times, as shown in the autobiography that opens this blog), writing history (master’s and doctoral theses, published articles), teaching history (35 years, college and university levels) or learning about history for most of my life. The most important thing that the study of history has taught me from day one is how incredibly imperfect everything that happens truly is. There is just nothing in this world that ever works out the way that people think that it ought to have worked out.

To start with, history is imperfect because everyone who communicates historical information necessarily follows some particular interpretation of events, whether in oral form, written form or any other form (such as film or photos). No human being is capable of transmitting any kind of narrative whatsoever without introducing some kind of personal bias. And it really does not matter what the subject is: universal history, cultural history, national, regional or local history, the history of many people, a few people or just one person.

This applies even to those few professional historians who try very hard to avoid any sort of prejudice and who voluntarily submit their work to the judgment of their (extremely critical) peers. It applies even more ardently to those other egotistical professionals who are convinced that theirs is the only possible interpretation that makes any sense. Not to mention the millions of journalists and other amateur historians of all kinds whose output varies in its degree of honesty from one individual to another.

But the more important point is the fact that the imperfection of history completely demolishes and discredits every attempt that proselytizers are always making to convert everyone to the one true belief, whether religious or otherwise. These people, innocently unaware of their own hypocrisy, think that everyone who does not support their obviously correct point of view is being biased and ideological, but not them. This peculiar attitude shows up not only in the often incoherent ramblings of fundamentalist sects, whether religious or political, but also in the official discourse of powerful politicians and investors representing currently dominant ideologies.

Today’s leading ideology is based on faith in democracy, as if the popular majority was truly in power, instead of the infinitesimally small plutocracy that really runs the only theoretically democratic part of the world. These false democrats pretend to be ruling an international community of several dozen supposedly enlightened nation states, practicing free enterprise, free trade and all the other attributes of officially sanctioned neoliberalism and libertarianism. But they are just as supremely unaware of any possible contradiction between reality and their own peculiar ideological amalgam as any extremist professing the absolute and literal truth of whatever absurd, totalitarian concoctions that they may have themselves invented.

Since everyone necessarily possesses a particular ideology, whether marginal or hegemonic, no honest historian can ever completely support any particular side in any particular debate, over anything at all. Moreover, since history is the study of everything that took place in the past and the past is everything that is not happening right now, or in the unforeseeable future, then no honest person can ever accept at face value any particular point of view about any possible phenomenon that has ever existed. It makes no difference whatever whether or not the historical discourse being analyzed is very recent or really ancient; all human discourse is necessarily biased. The truly intelligent and aware people among us are those who admit that no matter when or where they occur, “the facts” are always ideological constructions and no perfect description of reality is ever possible.

The domain in which this shows up in the most obvious way is in the study of geopolitics. For example, probably the geopolitical topic most often referenced since the Second World War is the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is also one of the  most emotional issues that has ever been debated. Every single entity involved in that conflict, such as the state of Israel itself, the different political factions within Israel, all the Palestinian factions and movements that have sprung up over the years, the other Arab countries, the other Muslim countries, the USA, the Christian Zionists, and every other country, political and religious organization in the world, has its own particular take on that conflict. Unfortunately, all of those “takes” are necessarily erroneous, although some of them may certainly be closer to reality than others. As a result, there is no way that any honest observer could thoroughly support one side or the other in that conflict, or any other conflict, without committing some kind of egregious error. Any either/or approach (“you are either for us or against us”) is necessarily ridiculous.

Most observers invariably get all caught up in the specific predicates of any such conflict. No one ever likes to admit that every possible point of view on anything is necessarily erroneous, in one way or another. There are dozens of reasons why some people support Israel and dozens of reasons why other people support Palestine, but none of them take into account the true interests of all the real people directly involved. In an ideal world, both peoples would be able to live together and prosper peacefully in a harmonious, honest, binational state, but no sane person could possibly believe that such a perfect solution could ever really come into being. None of the sides really wants that to happen, ever.

Human societies never work in any utopian way, and every side in every conflict is always corrupted by circumstances and never proceeds in an ideal fashion. During the Cold War, for example, the officially democratic countries fought against the totalitarian communist menace by allying themselves with over a hundred ultra right-wing military dictatorships spread out all over the world. Which meant that though the self-proclaimed democracies did often function in a somewhat more democratic way inside their own countries than the authoritarian countries did, they were not really promoting democracy as a principle. Since every single ideological conflict in the world is now and always has been corrupted by such dubious alliances, one wonders whether or not any of the leaders of human institutions ever truly believe in their own propaganda. Most of the time, ideological principles are used in the same cynical way as commercial advertising, to sell products and ideas, and after the sale is accomplished are not considered to have any intrinsic value whatsoever.

It makes no difference either whichever geopolitical conflict is being analyzed. In today’s Middle East (North Africa and Western Asia), besides Israel and Palestine, there are dozens of similar conflicts and all the other regions in the world have or have had hundreds of other examples to offer. Wherever and whenever political, economic, social or cultural groupings of people gather themselves into any sort of collective entity, each definable group will always try to degrade or to defeat the aspirations and the activities of any rival group. The separating process that succeeds in splitting human beings into rival groups leads each gang of insiders to invent its own particular systems of identification that deliberately make it impossible to find common ground with any of the outsider groups.

Throughout the centuries, in every different region, all sorts of human groupings have competed with each other for the right to exist and once they achieved that right they inevitably sought domination over all the others. Using only recent examples, whether this process takes place at a global level for world domination (the USA, Russia, China, etc.), regional domination (Germany in Europe, Brazil in Latin America, India in South Asia, etc.) or local domination (the UK versus Scotland, Canada versus Quebec, the Hutus versus the Tutsis in Rwanda or Burundi), makes no difference. Every geopolitical or cultural entity is only interested in its own advancement, whenever it becomes stronger, or its own survival, whenever it becomes weaker. In every case, might makes right: the winning side gets to write the official history of every conflict, unless or until the losing side somehow manages to make a comeback and become the new winning side.

Changing the parameters of the conflict makes no difference either. It does not matter in which particular period of history any conflict has taken place, nor in which domain of human intercourse. Tribal rivalries, religious divisions, conflict between the social classes, are all just as complicated and corrupted by opportunism as any of the geopolitical clashes. Today’s regional wars, like those in the past, are always characterized by all sorts of shifting alliances, making it impossible for anyone, including fundamentalist sects, to legitimately claim any kind of purity whatsoever. History makes every conflict dirty and disgusting, with the result that some of the world’s most fanatic purifiers, such as today’s Islamic State movement, often turn out to be nothing but counter-gangs, or agents provocateurs, under the occult control of external forces. For that reason, no one involved in any conflict can ever be truly certain about what he or she is truly fighting for, or against.

This is why it is so ridiculous for true believers to proclaim that their particular ideology is somehow more sacred than all the rival beliefs. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucianist or any other kind of religious fundamentalists always treat their own founding texts as literal truth of universal significance, descending onto the earth from some ethereal source. But historical analysis of all those texts always determines that none of them were ever revealed all at once by any (non-existent) higher entity and were in fact always the product of centuries of change and dispute between competing religious and geopolitical forces within their respective regions.

Every supposedly sacred text has in reality been altered hundreds of times to reflect the historical evolution of each host society. In exactly the same complicated way that any theoretically non religious, merely political ideologies, have also evolved over time. Anyone who has ever read anything about the evolution of conservative, liberal, nationalist or socialist ideas knows something about the extremely convoluted process by which ideological orthodoxies come into being. The development of the Marxist ideology is an excellent example of such a process, with its constant divisions between competing varieties of democratic and totalitarian socialists. In the end, the currently accepted versions of the Bible or the Koran are in fact no more sacred than the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, or even the compiled quotations from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”.

But none of this leveling off of competing religions and ideologies into so many separate  forms of human discourse means that people are obliged to give in to moral indifference, or ambiguity. Just because no single interpretation of history has any kind of monopoly on the truth, just because every set of ideas is always corrupted and compromised by being mixed up with all the other sets of ideas, does not mean that people should just reject all possible interpretations of reality in a relativist way. Principles guiding thought and action should still be put forward and argued even though no one can honestly expect any of them to necessarily prevail in the real world.

As anyone reading my blog already knows, I also have my own set of such principles, that I share in some cases with millions of other people. For example, I favor complete social equality between men and women, rather than any forms of male chauvinism, whether blatantly proclaimed or hypocritically disguised. Unfortunately, though some parts of the world managed to go quite a distance toward feminist emancipation in relatively recent times, we now live in a period of almost universal regression. More and more men are moving back to an antediluvian attitude toward women, if they ever abandoned it in the first place.

This has become obvious not only in extreme examples like most parts of India but also among native peoples in Canada as well as within the National Football League in the USA. In most such instances, cultural relativism is being used to camouflage such atavism, including the many cases in which women themselves identify with their aggressors (the Stockholm syndrome), such as in deliberately wearing either far too much or far too little clothing in public. In every case where women are being mistreated, it does not do any good to denounce sexism only on the part of dominant countries, or cultural majorities, or social classes, or even, in the case of the Stockholm syndrome, only among men. Equal opportunity denunciation also requires that sexist attitudes be attacked wherever they appear, in every country, every cultural community and every social class. Religious fundamentalism, cultural isolationism and social degradation are not acceptable excuses for rotten behavior of the sexist variety, any more than psychotic levels of egoism in all the world’s toxic personalities are acceptable excuses either.

Another principle that I particularly favor is secularism, based on the complete separation of church and state. In today’s complicated societies, allowing any one religion to get closer to state power than any of the others is thoroughly disgusting. This principle is also quite useful for women’s liberation, since women are invariably the main targets of the kind of religious exaggeration now known as social conservatism. But freedom of religion is almost useless if it is not accompanied by freedom from religion, for everyone who so chooses. Unfortunately, once again it seemed for a time that many more enlightened countries were gradually replacing belief in mythical mystifications with a more scientific approach, but recently the trend has turned in the opposite direction. People are now combining religion with individualism by cherry-picking whatever mystical concepts they choose to adopt, making a total mockery of every established corpus of belief. Even many scientific communities, originally founded on a firm rejection of belief in any concept that cannot be verified by observation or experience, are now letting religious concepts in through the back door, thereby severely undermining their own credibility.

Another one of my chosen principles is the refusal to accept enormous differences in social equality. Once again, there was a tendency not so long ago among many enlightened countries to gradually reduce the gap between the social classes, whereas nowadays this has been replaced by the neoliberal tendency to greatly increase that gap. This is another extremely dangerous trend that has even been denounced by some establishment thinkers as threatening any future expansion of the world economy. To be sure, promoting social equality too much, to the extent, for example, of giving the same mark to every student during a semester is ridiculous, but the 30 million to one gap between daily incomes in today’s world borders on the insane. Nothing good can ever come from the adoption of the so-called Haitian model, in which billions of ultra-poor people are forced to sacrifice their lives to please a small handful of ultra-rich people. Extremely high levels of corruption are the inevitable result, as in India where it seems that an incredible 97% of the total population (1.4 billion people) is forced to scrounge for a living outside the formal economy!

A related principle that I have tackled in my master’s and doctoral theses, as well as in my published articles and my political activity, was distilled from a long-term study of the troubled relations between economic nationalism and economic liberalism. Those studies led me to firmly reject the ideological premise of libertarianism, to the effect that individual control of everything, most particularly the economy, is somehow necessarily superior to collective control. This premise is based on the egotistical mania of toxic personalities, who use an appeal for individual freedom as a cover for their own elitist domination of the supposedly inferior underlings who, according to them, were born only to serve their superior interests. They claim that the enormous corruption of all public bodies over the centuries has been caused by their collective nature, deliberately obscuring the fact that all public corruption has a private origin, whether in the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China or any other place. In reality, corruption is not at all confined to either individual or collective causes, and is much more universal than any of the world’s religions or political ideologies.

A further, very basic, principle is the need to uphold the integrity of the natural environment. People all over the world are now tolerating extremely high levels of pollution much too willingly, particularly in newly industrialized countries like China but also in richer countries like Canada, in which the conservative government has steadfastly refused for the past eight years to observe any environmental standards whatsoever. According to the Canadian government, the 47 people who died last year in the village of Lac Mégantic when a petroleum train blew up were killed only by the negligence of individual workers and not at all by the total absence of federal regulation of the devil-may-care railway and petroleum industries. The world’s largest polluters systematically refuse to accept any blame whatever for climate change or any of the other consequences of their consistently reactionary behavior. Like the tobacco companies, they throw all the blame back on individual choices and refuse to acknowledge any collective responsibility for anything at all.

As I pointed out earlier, however, upholding progressive principles like these ones does not imply leaving behind a sense of reality. Just because people like me feel that these ideas are far superior to their opposite numbers does not mean that we ought to think that they will eventually triumph. In the absence of any plausible reason to believe in the inevitability of progress, it is entirely possible, and is even becoming probable, that superior ideas could eventually die out altogether. Millions of people all over the world may agree that these principles are the best ones known to mankind, but hundreds of millions of other people do not agree at all. Religious fundamentalists, political extremists and ultra-individualists all have their own principles that are in total contradiction with the ones that people like me support. Where we see good, they see evil and where we see evil, they see good.

Deliberate ignorance on a mass scale, as in the Nigerian Islamist “Boko Haram” movement (“Western education is sinful”), combined with enormous sums of money, being channeled through such entities as the political action committees in the USA or the petroleum dollars of the Gulf states, may soon succeed in wiping out the world’s most progressive ideas completely. If current trends continue, the future of humanity could very well be an atavistic reversal of past development (the scientific revolution, the age of enlightenment) and a universal return to truly primitive ways of thinking. Unfortunately, all the social and material wealth of human societies is exclusively based on more modern modes of thought, with the result that a return to primitivism would undoubtedly eliminate most of the world’s population in the process.

History is imperfect. The final proof of that is the absence of any teleological imperative leading toward human progress. Everything is entirely dependent on ideological choices taken by imperfect people, individually and collectively, whose unfortunate decisions are  often determined by egotistical fantasies of omnipotence and immortality.